Happy New Year! Snapchat is leaking users’ phone numbers online. To prove it, hackers posted 4.6 million of them online last night.
What’s Snapchat? Essentially it is a service everyone is using for extra privacy, in which messages (kind of) self-destruct after a few seconds. Snapchat users, such as those that post Snapchat Porn and other adult content, are attracted to the service for privacy reasons, so a data leak by Snapchat is an especially serious blemish.
To be clear, a leaked phone number is not a leaked credit card or Social Security number. It’s an open question for some if a phone number even qualifies as personal information — some people post numbers on Facebook and Google profiles, for example.
It’s concerning, however, that Snapchat’s service clearly isn’t working the way it’s supposed to — no one should be able to download millions of user names and associated phone numbers, obviously. This flaw hints at other flaws which might exist in Snapchat. It’s even more concerning that Snapchat hasn’t responded to the security community as other software companies do. Snapchat pooh-poohed the announcement of the initial vulnerability and isn’t exactly racing to apologize to users now. Yes, the potential for a hacker to derive your phone number from Snapchat is a very low severity risk. But one wonders how Snapchat will handle other issues.
What should you do?
If you use your Snapchat handle on other services, you might consider changing it. There isn’t much more you can do about this incident. But you might ask yourself: Why would you trust Snapchat, or any similar service, with your phone number?
For more about the Snapchat incident, include comments from the hackers, see this story at The Verge.
For Snapchat’s comment on the initial vulnerability, read this.
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